LAST November Roy Hodgson laughed off a newspaper article touting him to manage Britain’s 2012 Olympic footballers. “I’m flavour of the month, that’s all,” he joked. “I can think of a more suitable job.”

He never suggested what job was more suitable.

But Hodgson is now the new Liverpool manager. And the fear amongst some Reds fans is that it’s because those seven-month old words have become a self-fulfilling prophecy, because, to use Hodgson’s own description, he’s “flavour of the month.”

If so, Hodgson has been a particularly enduring flavour.

Fulham were undoubtedly Europe’s surprise package last season.

But Hodgson’s record as a manager is no surprise to people who have followed football outside these shores.

It was way back in 2002 that Hodgson said: “Of course, my track record, if people bothered to study it, would put me in the same category as Sir Alex Ferguson enjoys today, but people don’t talk about what I’ve done outside England.

“Here, they just talk about Blackburn Rovers, but that’s just a very small part of a 26-year career.”

That’s a glittering 26-year career, by the way – which he has only enhanced in the eight years since.

The list of achievements are as impressive as the variety of landscapes in which they were achieved.

He won one championship with Halmstads in Sweden, then five successive titles with Malmo.

He coached Neuchatel Xamas in Switzerland before taking over the Swiss national team, where he enjoyed unparallelled success.

“At our peak, I got a mysterious phone call from FIFA House in Zurich,” he explained.

“It said ‘We’d rather not tell you why, but Sepp Blatter would like you here’. I arrived and met Berti Vogts.

“He didn’t know why he’d been summoned either.

“We found they were announcing the new FIFA world ranking system, and it was Brazil 1, Germany 2, Switzerland 3.

“We were no more third in the world than I was a Chinaman!”

A self deprecating tale, perhaps, but it also underlines that Switzerland had never before enjoyed such a lofty standing in world football, and Hodgson guided them there by cannily selling the Swiss FA on the idea of regular internal training camps where players would play for their clubs at the weekend, then join the national squad for Mondays and Tuesdays. The move developed a club ethos within a country framework.

From there Hodgson took Inter Milan from bottom of Serie A to Europe and a UEFA Cup final.

In Norway he took Viking Stavanger from the relegation zone into the UEFA Cup and he narrowly missed qualification for Euro 2008 with Finland.

Unfortunately our closest point of reference with Roy Hodgson here on Merseyside was an unhappy 18-month stint at Blackburn. But that disappointment aside, the man can clearly manage.

The appointment of the 62-year-old Londoner, however, has not been instantly and universally celebrated amongst the club’s fan-base – largely because he’s not a 59-year-old Scotsman.

There are other negatives, too.

He is an advocate of zonal marking.

He’s a pal of David Moyes.

And even though he’s fluent in Norwegian, Swedish and Italian, and competent in German, Danish, French, Japanese and Finnish – will he still be able to converse in fluent Carragher?

Those last three light-hearted downsides apart, the positives appear to heavily outweigh the negatives.

The fear is that while his managerial qualities appear equipped to steer Liverpool on an upwardly mobile course again, the question remains as to whether he will be given the tools and the backing to do so.

The Steven Gerrard and Fernando Torres questions have to be answered quickly.

If one or both do depart, he must find out how much money he will be able to reinvest in his playing squad.

And he will quickly find out whether the Liverpool fans’ long-held and renowned tradition for fiercely supporting their managers remains unimpaired by the total lack of trust those same fans have in the club’s hierarchy. If Roy Hodgson faces the greatest test of his footballing faith as he takes charge of a football club at a historical crossroads, so too, do Liverpool’s fans.

The name Hodgson has figured twice before in Liverpool’s long and illustrious history.

Gordon Hodgson was one of the greatest goalscorers ever to grace the club.

David Hodgson was a journeyman striker who managed barely 10 goals in 49 games.

Both enjoyed the passionate backing of the fans.

Roy Hodgson deserves that backing, too, because he is clearly more than just a “flavour of the month.”